What is terrorism? US don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more.

by burakdharkan

It is actually an essay I’ve written for my final assignment for a class.

Definition of terror or terrorism in both international or local scale is very hard to define. US army or British government takes it as a calculated use of violance to attain goals that are political, religious or ideological in nature.

For quite some time, definition of terror for US and Israel is mostly based on finding a way to start a war that will work for their benefits. For US, declaring a war on terror had become centerpiece of their foreign policy. But the thing is, US’ real policy is counterterrorism and in accordance to this they have the chance to be able to say that US is not officially committed to terrorism. If we want to look at example of it in the history, we see Nazi Germany.

Official definitions are no good in most of the cases. For example, terror and resistance. We are seeing it in our very own country at the moment. Only thing that is required to call resistance a terrorist act (or marginal groups, chapulliers in our case) is dominance over country’s main powers. Once a government has media, armed forces (both police and army) and law under control, chance are high that they’ll try to make you look like terrorists rather than resisters against authority and its unfair policies.

So when we get back to topic, let’s explain how and why US and Israel oppose the decision that has been made in UN. Because for long years up until now, there “colonial and racist regimes” have been their playground. Chomsky notes that by no means he’s taking the terrorist acts as if they were justifiable but the way two countries act is usually (or almost all the time) had been considerably bigger terrorist acts in the name of “fixing things” or “changing regimes” or “protecting world and our country” . Most of these reasonings were utter bullshit, world would have gone bonkers if any other country had done such a thing but US and his best buddy Israel can get away with this.

As oppposed to what everyone think, in my opinion US always had the power to go and terrorize some underdevelopped country for whatever “redemptive” reason, I said as opposed to everyone thinks because of 9/11 and America using it as an excuse to become aggressive. After 9/11 what President Bush said sums up US government’s foreign policy pretty much; “We are in the state of war now.” They are exactly doing that ever since.

They started with this horrible campaign right away; with the bombing of Afghanistan. 8 months later we’ve learnt that they knew the responsibles of 9/11. But they bombed the lifes out of Afghan territory. They turned major urban concentrations to ghost towns in hours. It was clearly an act of war crime but it wasn’t even mentioned in the global scale. On this case what the former director of Human Rights Watch Africa said pretty much sums up this wickedness; “I am unable to appreciate any moral, political or legal difference between this jihad by the US against those it deems to be its enemies and the jihad by Islamic groups against those they deem to be their enemies.”

But as I said, it is not just about 9/11 and afterwards. We can see Gulf War, invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan or in Israel’s case what happened in Jenin refuge camp. Boaz Evron, an Israeli write wrote something about this policy of theirs; “Israel should “keep them on a short leash” he wrote, so that they recognize “whip is held over their head.” As long as not too many people are being visibly killed, then Western humanists will “accept it all peacefully” and will ask “what is so terrible?”

Seriously, think about a change of role on that events. What if it was Syria or Palestine that were hunting jews one by one not in hundreds. Would world media and US and Israel be okay with that? Absolutely not. They would have flattened those countries in hours. That’s the big difference in between that we have to notice.

An interesting and for me quite accurate analysis is that the way against terrorism that US is doing do dearly is just inspiring more people to join terrorist ranks. After invasion of Iraq, there had been a spike on recruitment all over the world for terrorist groups. The war has created a new terrorist haven. And their goal is quite simple; drive infidels out of Muslim lands, overthrown corrupted governments and institude an extremist version of Islam.

As opposed to what many people think, Muslims do not hate Americans or United States. For example, rich muslim population in US supports their policies in general but they are bitter about recent issues concerning Israel – Palestine and Iraq. And also US citizens are not happy with these policies either. They believe their money should not be wasted of west instead of serving domestic needs.

So if we try to sum all of it up; we see a picture of global manipulation with the help of global media and with the power from it there comes dominance over underdevelopped countries with excuse of terrorism. What US and Israel basically doing is supporting and training anti-democratic groups and governments but when it is time they crush them with the excuse of being their “salvation” and salvage what’s left for their own good.